How my school gamed the stats
greaterwrong.com
greaterwrong.com
> There were many ways in which the school and teachers gamed the system to boost their measured performance. One way was to do exams for students. I was on a bottom set language class for French. After two years I literally couldn’t speak a single sentence in french and maybe knew 20 words in total. I still passed my exams. How? We did the tests in class. Often the teacher would go through them with us. Literally giving us the test and then going through each question on the whiteboard and telling us what to write. A different year and a different teacher, this time the teacher would sit next to us and write the answers down.
Could this behavior by teachers really be widespread??? I think this is just an anomaly of the author's school. Any of my teachers would've been wary of behaving like this. Kids don't keep such things quiet! I'm sure this behavior would be quickly reprimanded by administrators or other teachers in my past schools.
I've never seen anything this egregious, but in my own experience people are usually willing to go along with systems that don't make sense (according to their ostensible purpose) and aren't very fair, if that's what everyone else is doing and there's no personal gain to be had by rocking the boat.
Some information that may be new to you:
Widespread cheating is common in the US. Atlanta, El Paso, Columbus. Google "big city name + cheating" and you'll likely get a result.
"A state investigation of Columbus, Ohio, public schools found a "top-down culture of data manipulation and employee intimidation" in connection with changes to test scores and student grades" [0]
"An investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) released in July 2011 indicated that 44 out of 56 schools cheated on the 2009 CRCT.[2] One hundred and seventy-eight educators were implicated in correcting answers entered by students" [1]
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303277704579349...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Public_Schools_cheatin...
She graduated from Harvard.
The mom got 24 months probation, 200 hours of community service, and had to pay $15k in restitution.
Also “Operation Varsity Blues” revealed it is indeed possible to bypass ‘well-proctored’ protections.
American Exceptionalism — what this comment is — is pure delusion. I watched kids cheat on proctored exams a generation ago, and I’m certain it’s continuing and I’m certain my nieces and nephews will see the same.
I noticed then that several governments to please the UN (and get their precious IMF money and whatnot) will then game the stats as needed.
I am from Brazil, here the public schools after UN meddling got in the picture first went the route OP said, but the UN didn't rated the country education based on scores, but based on dropouts, the more dropouts you have the worse your score is.
So solution is not have dropouts! Cue government doing two things:
1. Banning any possible form of homeschooling.
2. Making a law where you can't fail a kid, even if the kid is completely retarded and just drools all day, as long the kid in question can write their own name (even if they don't understand the meaning or treat it just as a drawing), they will pass...
3. Convince the population that avoiding dropouts is important, the government regularly runs massive marketing programs (doesn't even matter if government is left or right) saying how important it is for kids to finish school, and how great it is that now that they can't fail, they don't drop out.
Can you post a link to this human rights document please?
As for what I am talking about, read Article 26.
I will quote the relevant phraseS (not the whole article) for brevity:
"Elementary education shall be compulsory"
and
"Education shall ... tons of stuff ... and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace."
And this is reinforced elsewhere.
"Article 29.3:
These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations."
"Article 30:
Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein."
And just to explain why I said Brazil went with the cheating route after UN meddling:
Until around 1970s, Brazil didn't need the IMF or anything like that, thus it was ignoring the UN regarding certain subjects, among them it was that then the approach to public schooling was that the purpose of the public school was the education of brilliant students, and those that didn't want to be there shouldn't be there, so bad students, bullies, etc... were outright kicked out.
> Article 26.
> (1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
> (2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
> (3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.
You need to quote all of it to give the correct context.
Here's article 29 in full:
> Article 29.
> (1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
> (2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
> (3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations
29(3) is saying that nation states can't, for example, claim to be providing people with compulsory eduction when in fact those people are being indoctrinated.
4. Government gives money to families whose kids don't have more than 3 day misses per bimestrial.
The first is professors providing previous exams for students to study from, and then only changing the numbers, not the questions (e.g. the test is a template). This wasn't the norm, but it wasn't uncommon either--several professors gained nicknames to this effect, and you knew if you were in one of their classes how everything was going to work.
Even if the professor didn't provide the exam, fraternities and sororities usually kept prior exams from folks who had done well, and I believe the "learning center" also would keep copies, to the point where I am occasionally recognized when I come back to campus (mostly for recruiting) because one of my completed computer architecture tests has been given out as reference for the past decade.
The second is providing study sessions the day/night before an exam where professors would run through common scenarios that might appear on tests. When done correctly, students would ask the questions and the prof would get another student to demonstrate and they would help as necessary--when done poorly (and unfortunately, in my experience, the more common of the two), it devolved to the first scenario.
Neither are explicitly "cheating" in the way outlined in the parent (I don't know if they'd show up on accreditation, for instance), but they achieve the same end result.
As a bonus, I worked as a proctor in the learning center for a year or two, and while the majority of students came in because they were legitimately struggling with one concept and needed tutoring to jump the knowledge gap, there was a core group of frequent fliers who were there every day basically getting their homework done by others, and thus boosting overall grades (and ultimately graduation rate).
As has been stated many, many times in this thread, incentives (staying accredited, getting some arbitrary US News and World Reports ranking, having a high graduation/job placement rate, etc.) push this behavior to the detriment of student learning.
On top of this, anecdotally it seemed that the marginal schools were made worse because they would spend time teaching to the test, while the higher performing schools didn't feel compelled to do that.
There are still knock-on effects today after having stopped that. Our daughter has been consistently behind by 1-1.5 years in assessment testing in every subject from grades 1-6. It took years of fighting to get her retained.
An actual conversation ended with the person we were talking to admitting that the best thing for both the school and our daughter would be to retain her, and that the only reason they were refusing was because "it is against policy for us to retain any student for any reason other than a long-term absence"
Fortunately once that was said out loud we made progress through the system again. Prior to that there was all sorts of apologia for the policy, and how retaining our daughter would cause irreparable damage to her psyche; as if her knowing she was the "dumb kid" and having entire lessons go completely over her head was not at all damaging...
Yeah they can have a few kids not take it, but the overall score still is impacted by 98%.
> ... I was mostly in top ability streamed classes, meaning my classroom experience was likely far better than average.
I remember doing "class exercises" which were collected and had much less security (around copying, cheating) than normal tests.
Bold of you to assume the prime directive of most schools is to teach kids.
The point of the tests is to evaluate the schools overall effectiveness. As much as test-centric cramming effects those results, it creates a false picture.
Some notes and observations:
Because the state both accommodates and encourages this scenario, the fault can't reasonably be laid on the schools.
A more impeccable (but problematic) way to handle these tests would be for the state to show up with little/no notice and administer it.
I'm personally inclined to scrap state assessment testing altogether. The zero-sum nature of pitting the schools against each other for limited funding consumes a great deal of precious teaching time for little clear benefit.
This conversation happened at our county's first charter school. A few years earlier, this principal happened to be my son's PS teacher.
The point of the tests should be to determine what topics a student has successfully mastered and which they need to spend more time on. If each school is allowed to come up with their own standard, it will be difficult to tell which schools are lowering standard. Using it as a measure of school effectiveness is a secondary measure that is really not possible without longitudinal data.
Even if you do believe evaluation works the way it is I still think its execution doesn't make any sense. You're taking schools that have bad grades and granting them less money on the next term, what positive effect is this supposed to have?
True, but if you see scores consistently jump in one subject year-over-year, that's probably because of a good teacher. For evaluating teachers, relative test scores are more interesting.
As for schools, yeah, it's heard when you're bumping into a lot of external limitations. You almost need to model expected performance and benchmark against that because it's incredibly hard to get mediocre performance out of bad circumstances.
If test scores are rewarded, teachers will teach to the test. The obvious solution is to accept the fact that people respond to incentives, and make the test better.
Assessing the quality of education by economic output means the engineer who declines a job at Google or Facebook to take a job at a human rights non-profit is a "worse" engineer, and their education must be considered substandard compared to one who goes and takes a Big Tech job. Same with doctors who volunteer to run free HIV clinics in sub-Saharan Africa when they could get a job doing buttlifts for movie stars in Los Angeles, or lawyers who become public defenders or represent asylum seekers and other public interest clients rather than doing extremely well-compensated corporate work.
In as much as it reduces all of human life and values to numbers on a spreadsheet, yes, there is almost certainly something wrong with it.
First, it's obviously not a fair measure; tax contributed is not a direct reflection of education quality. Parents, background, accidents, moving abroad... You can't possibly clean the statistics enough to get rid of all those factors.
Second, it's not the business of the school to know my tax information and employment status. You can't measure something based on a number that you can't know.
To me this implies more material will be tested, to the point where the test dictates the course material.
Have school districts not yet discovered that competition applied to learning is counterproductive?
The things we do to maximize fiscal efficiency (grouping by age, school start times during optimal sleep periods) aren't in the students' best interests. The OP's article seems to bear witness of that.
I was in it for two years; it was a really good experience. As for the outcome, all I know it wasn't broadly adopted.
My town's school department had 5 elementary schools. During 4th grade, my elementary school which I lived closest to was underperforming in state evaluation tests. This meant that they allowed anybody attending it to transfer over to any other elementary school. I opted for this option and was able to re-attend my original elementary school before I had moved.
My (charter) high school consistently performed in the higher ranks for SAT & state tests. They didn't have any classes to prepare us for them, although that probably would have been useful from a college admissions perspective. If a school is performing really badly it's probably that their curriculum is flawed or that management isn't doing a good job. Competition applied to learning helps light a fire under people doing a bad job running a school.
However, the testing dynamic tends to nurture a perverse incentive for counties to showcase their high performing schools and increase funding to them. Some school boards resist that temptation better than others.
On the other end you game the system by offering scholarships, and by selecting parents who are keen enough to part with a few tens of thousands of pounds a year.
I'm pretty surprised at the outright exam cheating though. My guess would be that if it happened it would be the teachers doctoring the papers without the students seeing it.
My impression of the UK school system is that they've done a lot with reducing bullying in the last couple of decades. It's visible when you visit a school that they care about it, and the kids have assemblies about it, something that would have been left to the kids themselves back in my day.
This is very common in the private, for-profit schools in Sweden. The general procedure goes as follows:
1. Spend heavily on marketing to attract 'good students' 2. Avoid selecting 'bad students' 3. Automatically use the scores that follow from this selection to create a feedback loop that keeps bringing in good students 4. Cut as much spending as you can - you're getting paid a set amount of money per student from the government, after all 5. Pocket the difference
Meanwhile, the public schools are not allowed to engage in the same sort of filtering and are hence required to accept the 'bad students', which constrains their resources and creating the opposite feedback loop to what the private for-profit schools have.
Kind of sickening, to be honest.
Can confirm, as a former teacher. There were days when that 1 kid was sick, and the entire class worked completely differently. Suddenly it was possible to teach, the other kids learned, and some of them even said they preferred it that way. Then that 1 kid returned.
In teachers' room, 95% of time spent talking about students, is usually about the same 5 kids.
/s
This effect is already seen heavily in suburbs of Australia, where Asian (particularly Chinese) migrants will buy into suburbs with good schools - pushing out poorer families due to increased pricing.
The fundamental problem is that we need to treat poor behaviour in the same way we treat serious autism - with special schools for those students. The problem is that those schools will get filled with minorities, the whole thing will be attacked as 'racist', and we'll be back to square one.
White people leave an area due to minorities coming. The new area property value increases... More tax money, resources for schools, better teachers get attracted to schools and districts with more resources.
Also a part of my wonders how much influence schools even have on the kids. Families with more resources can pay to get outside help, like enrolling their kids in Kumon...or getting a private SAT tutor.
This is a commonly held myth but it's not backed up by the data. Inner city districts are usually near the top of their state for per pupil spending. What they lack in residential tax base they usually make up for in commercial buildings. All of those high rise office buildings pay lots of property tax and don't send any kids to school.
The problem is that acknowledging this leads to politically incorrect conclusions, so we continue to throw money at education and certain schools.
We'd achieve better outcomes by reducing air and plastic pollution which are shown to have substantial negative potential impacts on intelligence and personality.
How are you distinguishing the two? Show us the evidence, not your conclusions.
Atlanta Public Schools: $15300 Fulton: $12700 Gwinnett: $9500 Forsyth: $9200 Dekalb County: $8800
I left Dekalb for Gwinnett. Gwinnett and Forsyth in general have much better schools, but spending is similar. Atlanta Public Schools has the highest spending in the state, and is the source of the cheating scandal from years back and in general does not have great schools.
does this include donations and other sources of revenue (eg. bake sales)?
Students that for example try to rank high in status by using violence in class or bullying will also always exist. They are extremely costly and teachers are not allowed to incentivize good behavior.
What I mean is that private schools quickly understand just how much damage a student can do and the teacher board / politicians really don’t, they think everything is sunshine and unicorns and put systems in place that are extremely naive.
The system in place only highlights the problem, but it’s not the root cause.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jul/07/oxford-bull...
[0] or, as they are called in the UK, “public schools”, because reasons
The politician Really understand the problem that is the reason their kids are on the private school or them likely live in the ""same district"" then.
i don't understand this position. violence will always exist but we should blame the politicians?
>the teacher board / politicians really don’t ... are extremely naive
where you're mistaken is that
>the root cause
is exactly these kinds of practices that divide people/create inequality.
Yes! Sure, violence will always exist but that doesn’t mean that kids should have to be subjected to it. I was bullied in the “dragged outside of a teachers view and then beaten until I couldn’t move” sense and you know what happened to them… fucking nothing. Like actually literally nothing. Everyone in the school knew all the times it happened including the teachers and administrators but nobody had the power to remove them from school. One of my teachers took pity on me and offered to give me “detention” whenever I needed it. That’s what they could do. My parents fought for years to do something with no avail and then moved me to a private school.
So yeah these practices create inequality because anyone lucky enough to have the means to get out does. As an individual family my parents couldn’t fix my local public school so they did what they could. Therapy was more expensive than the private school tuition.
This kind of sorting could actually be a good thing if resources were adequately devoted toward helping problem students find better outcomes. I wonder, for example, if trades education would be better suited for many of the problem students—allowing of course that there are manifold causes for bad classroom behaviors and poor outcomes.
Education is difficult, and I've snipped a rather lengthy comment that would probably be a waste of time to read. In sum, I think differentiation with strong socio-economic support (i.e., a social respect for all lines work and economic support for them) is probably a better solution than dumping people into classrooms who obviously don't belong there (at least not right now). But this is obviously hard to do (or else we'd probably have done it already).
The quality of the school experience depends as much on the peer group as on the teachers, curriculum, and facilities. Moving troublesome kids to schools with strict discipline can help them in life, too. But even if not, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
The troublesome kid goes somewhere, very likely somewhere worse equipped to deal with troublesome kids, not being a fancy school with a ton of money and all.
The system simply denies existence of such kids, and pretends that teachers just need to work harder, or we need to throw more money on that kid, and then everything will magically be ok.
It depends on the numbers, of course. If the 95% of kids only learned 1% more, it wouldn't be worth it.
It's notoriously hard to measure those numbers because everything is confounded by everything else and experiments take decades to run. But I think 20% is plausible and 1% isn't.
Again, it all depends on where the 5% end up. You're not allowed to take them out back and shoot them like an aggressive dog, so are you going to look after them and give them some kind of a future, or are you going to throw kids out onto the street to grow up into career criminals?
Depending on assumptions, it is easy to argue that money is best spent accelerating our brightest minds and giving extra support for the most at-risk, letting the middle atrophy. Or it is best to treat everyone equally, which certainly leaves the top underfulfilled and the bottom underprepared. It's just spitballing.
Your numbers are all invented whole cloth; please don't try to math with them.
More precisely: Why should I believe that the remaining kids learn more? In my experience, everyone learns more when they teach, as it forces them to shore up their assumptions. (When you learn something yourself, you learn one wrong way to do it. When you teach, you learn thirty wrong ways.) Having kids who think differently around for peer exchange is then a good thing overall. The struggling kids have stronger peers around to teach them, and the stronger kids have more chances to teach.
I found out how they do (part of) it. If a child living in the cupertino school district registers and is not proficient in english, they are "redirected" to a nearby school say in sunnyvale.
simple.
What can be teased out from that regarding cause/effect/deterministic is still mostly unknown.
I don't have a canonical source for this, but this nature paper gets the point across. This link [1] also has a useful chart on p. 6 to visualize the point.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-018-0022-0
[1] https://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/reardon%20dist...
If you see the above as a problem, and have a solution other then cross-town bussing, I'm all ears.
Normally there is some reasoning that public schools do well because of rich parents who can help fund the school and who generally care about their children’s education, and that’s an guess I might make about Cupertino based on your comment, but it seems to not be the case in SF.
Cupertino schools are fairly well funded, but not as well funded as schools in say Palo Alto. It was my experience that in our school the best students did most of their learning outside of class as very few public school teachers could keep up with them. From what I hear, some parents would send their children to private schools because they would do this and the schools would have somewhat better mentoring, but overall I didn't see much difference in the quality of top students from either.
- https://www.sfusd.edu/about/news/current-news/SF-Board-of-Ed... (which is clearly more important than https://www.sfusd.edu/services/health-wellness/covid-19-coro...)
- https://twitter.com/hknightsf/status/1359382113875755011
- https://www.sfgate.com/education/article/sf-school-lottery-L...
I think your idea of "rich parents funding SF public schools" would probably be rejected by the school board, so for most it's not even worth trying, given the proliferation of high quality private schools nearby. And even if the school accepts it, the community won't.
Say what you want about Zuck, but he donated $75M to the only public hospital in the city and they don't even want to keep the building named after him and his wife (who worked there no less!). Comically, they can't actually do anything about it, so they stick to meaningless non-binding resolutions.
Therefore, if given the choice, those who can are much more likely to spend 30-50k/year to send their kids to private HS than to try and go through the process of dealing with the city government. I assume that dealing with Cupertino/PA/etc. is frustrating, but not nearly as insane as SF.
There are consulting firms that help raise toddlers to be top performers.
The only thought I've had is to: 1) Rely on a spectrum of metrics, to get a more holistic perspective. Instead of just seeing "crime is down x%" administrators would see how many reports end up classified as a lower-level infractions, how civilians rate the safety of their area, etc. 2) Add common-sense restrictions to make stat-pumping more difficult. For example, bringing in classroom inspections on random days 3) Penalizing institutions and individuals who are clearly attempting to juke the stats. Enforcement would certainly be difficult, but simply having something to this effect on the books would, imho, reduce schools dedicating time to studying for a standardized test
At the very least it should diversify how people try to game the system, and then the "winners" of various bins could be studied to compare usage of different metrics in selection. If the specific formula could be kept mostly secret, perhaps switched up every so often, it would hopefully disincentivize gaming at all.
Along those lines, committees and metrics could both be used. Give committees control over 10% of the spots or something. Corruption is obviously a downside, but I do think committees also have upsides that are difficult if not impossible to replicate with pure metrics. In doing this committee selections could also be tracked against the various metric ones for longer term outcomes.
https://schoolsweek.co.uk/phonics-check-needs-rethink-after-...
The government decided to not share the pass mark ahead of time for tests in future years. I attended a conference that year at which the Education Secretary gave a keynote to an audience of educators; he got booed for not trusting teachers as a result.
I get frustrated by articles like this because they focus on second-order causes instead of first-order. I don't know how it works overseas, but the main problem in the US is that schools are funded by property taxes from state and local governments instead of the federal government (which only accounts for less than 10% of funding):
https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/index.html
Which means that public schools are a magnifying glass for issues like discrimination and wealth inequality that the whole country is wrestling with. Want to know why schools in the south side of Chicago are doing worse than schools in Beverly Hills? There's your answer. Full stop.
Until we fix that nationally, expect more of the same.
What's the solution? To me it's very simple, but unfortunately we need some kind of consensus on this, and that's not going to happen until people start reaching similar conclusions when presented with the same facts. But we're more polarized than ever.. so.. let me offer an analogy instead:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel
America is quite strong in certain areas (finance, the military, etc) but so weak in others (education, health and human services, etc) that we've become vulnerable. Look at Texas right now: the fossil fuel energy capital of America (maybe the world?) unable to keep the lights on as its citizens slowly freeze to death. Look at the US response to COVID-19 as hundreds of thousands of people die unnecessary deaths because we weren't brave enough to quarantine long enough. If that stuff isn't biblical, I don't know what is.
No, these problems are not due to failings at the personal or local level. They're systemic, national and cultural.
This analysis completely fails; the correlation between student performance and per-student spending in US schools is negative.
The analysis would fail anyway, though; spending on students (by parents) is also negatively correlated with student performance within families. Parents seek to bring low-performing children up to the level of high-performing children more than they seek to boost their high-performing children further.
IMO money plays some role, but it's not directly the property taxes that matter.
(Greater Wrong is probably great for powerusers, but I find the default view much uglier than LW.)
The article is interesting and depressing. I'm not surprised that the metrics are gamed, but I am surprised by how awful the school was, and how normal that apparently is.
Both our homeschooled boys played hockey for a local school and both our homeschooled girls are in Air Cadets, so they get plenty of socialising, and we've never had to deal with bullying.
I understand that homeschooling's not for everyone, but if you can then you should give it serious thought. Homeschooling's been around for decades, and with the advent of the Internet, there are now plenty of resources available - pretty much regardless of what country you're in.
im so sick of people offering this idiotic perspective because they never experienced being the target for more than a year. your opinion hurts people.
I think you're the one whose talking nonsense. Isolating children from the outside world to "protect them" (or for any reason for that matter) should not be celebrated.
I've been the target of relentless, viscous bullying in school, and it was at a time where kids openly bullied in front of teachers (and camp counselors) and it was just considered normal. Nobody ever tried to stop it because at the time that was not considered something to really correct, just part of normal childhood. The main reasons I was bullied was because I was a runt (physically) and I was not taught any social skills by my parents.
HOWEVER, my parents were severely abusive and were much worse bullies than anyone in school. If I were taken out of school because of "bullying" I would just be much, much worse off and I can't see how I'd ever be able to recover from that without exposure to the outside world. How else would I ever learn better, learn social skills, or learn to make friends (eventually)?
>there is no comparison whatsoever to bullying in school and in the workplace
In an office full of college graduates, probably not, but I've experienced very similar bullying at a dysfunctional blue collar job
Beyond that bullying growing up was just as bad at non-school organizations - summer camp, after school programs, and dance/gymnastics classes so I don't see how homeschooling (if my parents weren't abusive) is going to stop bullying without also isolating children from the outside world completely, which would be severely damaging. So you're basically advocating not letting children to socialize in any capacity because their feelings might get hurt by other kids. This is cruel.
My point is, homeschooling doesn't prevent bullying unless completely isolate your children. I'm not accusing all (or even most) homeschoolers of isolating their children, however, all the ones I personally know did isolate their children.
People are actually trying to stop bullying in school nowadays, so my experience would be different nowadays.
>childhood bullying damages the developing brain and creates lasting emotional damage
Oh, please, the severe emotional damage caused by isolating children from the outside world is so much worse. Also the severe emotional damage that parents can inflict on their children are so much worse than anything a peer at school can inflict, like 1000% worse. I was barely phased by the relentless bullying at school because home was just so much worse. (Plus my parents had already taught me that I was worthless, so it wasn't exactly surprising)
I've known a few people (different families) who grew up entirely isolated from the outside world to "protect" them from any person, place, or (especially) idea that wasn't pre-approved by their parents. They are all extremely dysfunctional. My husband was a boss to one of these guys and he literally couldn't function in the workplace and would have emotional breakdowns regularly. He's dead now, he killed himself. The rest I know are perpetual children who literally have no ability to function without a caretaker (usually their parents, one her arranged marriage husband). I have no idea what's going to happen to these people if they outlive their caretaker, I don't want to think about it, it's incredibly sad.
>im so sick of people offering this idiotic perspective because they never experienced being the target for more than a year. your opinion hurts people.
If you want to turn childhood trauma into a competition, I will "win."
Then why do we isolate adults from criminals, by putting criminals in prisons?
> I was barely phased by the relentless bullying at school because home was just so much worse.
That is wrong. But for many people it's the other way round.
I wonder if we could find a solution that would somehow help both types of kids. Being able to leave home, but also being able to avoid bullies at school.
nobody is saying children should be isolated. they should be isolated from things and people who will damage them regardless of what they do. a stove can harm a child, but a child can choose not to touch a stove. a viscous bully will target and track a child, and in modern schools there is no option to fight back. the child has to simply sit there and endure it. so for example, if you put a child into a good private school this would meet my criteria. almost invariably, bullies behave the way they do because they are abused at home. if you separate your kids from the wife-beating riff-raff then you have done your kids a huge favor without "isolating" them.
i would almost not care about this issue if we still had a sane culture that let kids behave naturally and fight each other from time to time. maybe you are a little older than me, but the way it works now is that kids are raised to believe that without school, their life will be over. worse, they will bring disgrace to themselves and their whole family if they dont do well in school. if you fight, you will jeopardize everything by getting in trouble, getting expelled. we are putting boys between and anvil and a hammer with no way out. if my kid has no way to overcome it, and it causes him intense psychological pain for years, then there is no use in subjecting him to it. i cant understand how anyone can not understand this blindingly simple fact.
the key to raising kids is to let them confront danger, adversity and challenges and to make sure they have some kind of agency to overcome what they are facing. school bullying is unambiguously outside of this category of things because fighting is not allowed. its basically no different than strapping the child down and torturing him. it will build just as much character.
there was never any bullying or heroin overdoses anywhere in my life except for my public school. there are all kinds of people, groups and activities. saying that all outside world interactions are the same is utter drooling nonsense.
palmer luckey and Billie Eilish are both homeschooled and they are doing a lot better than you are. not all homeschooling is the same. i could keep my kid in a cage and call it homeschooling.
i see that you endured intense trauma as a child and you enjoyed it. you would not do it any differently. a pamplet of your story should be given to victims of childhood trauma who have schizophrenia and other trauma-induced diseases. clearly they have an attitude problem. it is not the trauma that hurt them, it was their sour attitude about it. what a revolution you have brought.
The only lesson a state school can teach that might be missing in a homeschool program is that large institutions are out of your control, have their own motivations, and will maim you without a second's hesitation.
That said, the only handful of homeschooling families I knew 40 years ago were - to my recollection - exclusively religious in their motivations. Not everyone homeschooling family I know in the last few years is due to religious conviction, although that's still there in many cases.
Most schools are struggling to evolve in an environment they weren’t set up for. And in parallel, parents with money and/or education for it definitely try to game the system as well. Hence a bit of sympathy on my part.
I attended a private school that did the opposite: no “GPA” (just letter grades, no average nor class rank computed), its own curriculum, no designated “AP” courses (you could take the exam if you liked). And all the graduates did fine at university. It was very clear to me that they could get away with this because they had spent centuries educating kids. They strongly discouraged gaming the system...because they had gamed it at a deeper level already.
I'm sure some details are gameable, but what I'm more interested in are the inspectors' incentives, not just the schools'.
The London Challenge was implemented to turn around the issues in London schools that the author recounts, and did so remarkably successfully: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Challeng
However, the inspection thing chimes strongly with my experience and the focus on the resistant materials track of design technology as a way that anyone can get a 'good pass'.
All the effort went in to getting border line D kids to borderline C. If you were a borderline 5C candidate (a key metric in the UK at the time) you were on detention every night to try and trip over the line.
Which feels like a far more effective way of seeing the real world operations of a school or care facility.
The Australian Federal government has since introduced standardised testing in the form of NAPLAN and, yes, schools try to teach to the test. But the idea of teachers outright cheating on behalf of students is unfathomable.
Was I an outlier? Or did the author just have bad luck?
He passed with flying colours, after which the senior teacher asked discreetely when we intended to drink that beer, because he wanted to attend. Obviously stuff like this was completely normal and expected.
Teachers can't cheat on these as they don't have the tests until it opens. If the actual exams were happening in the way the author depicts, then
1) There would be a whistleblower
2) The people marking the exams would notice that people were getting the exact same answers (unlike US SATs, UK exams are mainly written answers, very few questions are multiple choice)
Now teachers do have copies of previous years exams, and go over those in class, and use them for mock-exams earlier in the year, isn't that normal? It's not cheating -- exams are an imperfect system, but if you're going to have exams, having test exams and going over what worked and what didn't is valid.
Another option for students who struggle at public or private high schools (and whose parents can afford it) is a "post-graduate" year at a dedicated private academy for 18 and 19 year olds. The main purpose of these academies is to bring their grades and SATs up to a good level so they are more likely to get in to a good college. I know two people who did this in the 90s, one of them got into NYU after the post-grad academy.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/eqao-cambr...
the school system as a whole wore away at the physical and psychological health of a massive number of kids because of the insane schedule that deprives them of sleep. this was scientifically proven a while ago.
american public schools are a disgrace. i would never enroll my kids into a public school. they are glorified daycare centers where the inmates run the asylum. and all you have to do is reflect on your interactions with average americans to understand the fact that these schools are more likely to damage a person intellectually than advance them.
the only thing that separates people who had a good experience vs people who didnt is their personality. if you are not on the spectrum then its just one big pleasant vacation. but if you are unhealthy, on the spectrum, have a troubled childhood or for whatever reason fall behind emotionally or socially, then public schools are worse than a death sentence. everyone involved should be ashamed.
For example, if you went to school in district A, everyone from district A took the test in a school building located in district B. The reverse was also true.
This has always struck me as such an easy system to implement that I'm always surprised when I hear about the "teachers just changed the results" stories. While I'm sure this doesn't eliminate the risk of collusion, doesn't it dramatically reduce it?
Plus, wasn't an entire chapter of Freakonomics dedicated to how teacher cheating can largely be caught algorithmically? In this day and age I would think it's even easier.
I’m not sure how I feel about inspections happening with so little notice. It’s surely a very stressful time to be a teacher. I wonder if inspections might be more fair if instead of a single inspection, several could be made over a year and then aggregated into the school’s grade.
When I was at secondary school, we did the same lesson three times with my French teacher before an upcoming OFSTED inspection and he said if we all kept quiet, he'd buy us all an Aero.
I will say though, some of the content of this article appears outdated, and the author doesn't seem to have checked to see if their memory lines up with the reality of how things work today.
For example, about Ofsted inspections:
> Now, you may imagine that these inspections would be unannounced, so as to best get a real image of how a school works. Not the case. They’re scheduled well in advance.
This is absolutely not the case today. Schools have a general idea of when an inspection will be (i.e: what season of the year) based on when their last inspection was, but they're only told that an inspection will happen on the morning of the inspection [0]. Schools don't really have a window of opportunity to game the inspection in the way the author describes.
> Another way the stats were gamed was by not recording bad behavior
This whole section seems a little naive. Teachers in lower sets have an incredibly tough job, and have to try to support those students who genuinely want to learn, but are struggling, while also managing the behaviour of disruptive children. Sometimes, it is the better option to just allow some disruptive behaviour slide (e.g: swearing) rather than interrupting the whole lesson just to deal with one kid. A lot of the time, if behaviour doesn't provoke any response, it won't escalate. As the author says, if a student is actually aggressive towards other students, then obviously action is taken, but I'm not sure they quite appreciate how difficult it is to try to teach a struggling class.
wrt cheating, it definitely happens. I'm not personally aware of any examples quite as extreme as what the author described, but I know my Spanish teacher turned a blind eye while I let my friends copy my work, for example, and I'm sure in the lower sets behaviour such as this was more widespread. I will say though, the exams the author is talking about here are GCSEs. They don't determine your ability to get into university, they're only used by 6th-forms (equivalent of US high school) to determine what subjects you can study. While they absolutely affect parents' perception of schools, they are not quite as serious as if students were receiving A-levels based on cheating. Also, students choose GCSE subjects. If someone only speaks 20 words of French, it's unlikely they would choose to study French.
0: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
I have family still in the school system in the UK - but they still get advanced notice. Essentially somebody at the school either knows the inspector or somebody very close to them, and gets a tip off about when it will occur. The system is still corrupt.
One of the biggest things they do is to take a disruptive child and literally lock them up in a building called "room 101". The entire school would have an assembly on that morning at very first thing and told to behave or else.
Half of the stories reflect exactly cases I know to have happened in my local secondary schools, where both students and teachers have acted badly, and in many cases illegally. Honestly, it really makes home schooling an attractive option if you can afford to do so.
That's impressive corruption. My mother works in one of the local secondary schools, and they absolutely do not get know when inspections will occur, I guess that really depends on the school.
So it's easy to imagine how occasionally an inspector would have an old friend at the school.
...
When I was in my last year at school, we seniors stayed around an extra week to cram for college boards. Our ancient-history teacher told us, on the basis of long experience, that we would do well to prepare ourselves to write for twenty minutes on each of a list of fifteen topics that he gave us. We studied his list. We knew the wisdom of taking that kind of advice; if we had not, we would not have been at that school. When the boards came, we found that his list comfortably covered every one of the eight questions we were asked. So we got credit for knowing a great deal about ancient history, which we did not, he got credit for being a good teacher, which he was not, and the school got credit for being, as it was, a good place to go if you wanted to be sure of getting into a prestige college. The fact was that I knew very little about ancient history; that much of what I thought I knew was misleading or false; that then, and for many years afterwards, I disliked history and thought it pointless and a waste of time; and that two months later I could not have come close to passing the history college boards, or even a much easier test, but who cared?
I have played the game myself. When I began teaching I thought, naively, that the purpose of a test was to test, to find out what the students knew about the course. It didn't take me long to find out that if I gave my students surprise tests, covering the whole material of the course to date, almost everyone flunked. This made me look bad, and posed problems for the school. I learned that the only way to get a respectable percentage of decent or even passing grades was to announce tests well in advance, tell in some detail what material they would cover, and hold plenty of advance practice in the kind of questions that would be asked, which is called review. I later learned that teachers do this everywhere. We know that what we are doing is not really honest, but we dare not be the first to stop, and we try to justify or excuse ourselves by saying that, after all, it does no particular harm. But we are wrong; it does great harm.
It does harm, first of all, because it is dishonest and the students know it. My friends and I, breezing through the ancient-history boards, knew very well that a trick was being played on someone, we were not quite sure on whom. Our success on the boards was due, not to our knowledge of ancient history, which was scanty, but to our teacher's skill as a predictor, which was great. Even children much younger than we were learn that what most teachers' want and reward are not knowledge and understanding but the appearance of them. The smart and able ones, at least, come to look on school as something of a racket, which it is their job to learn how to beat. And learn they do; they become experts at smelling out the unspoken and often unconscious preferences and prejudices of their teachers, and at taking full advantage of them. My first English teacher at prep school gave us Macaulay's essay on Lord Clive to read, and from his pleasure in reading it aloud I saw that he was a sucker for the periodic sentence, a long complex sentence with the main verb at the end. Thereafter I took care to construct at least one such sentence in every paper I wrote for him, and thus assured myself a good mark in the course.
Not only does the examination racket do harm by making students feel that a search for honest understanding is beside the point; it does further harm by discouraging those few students who go on making that search in spite of everything. The student who will not be satisfied merely to know "right answers" or recipes for getting them will not have an easy time in school, particularly since facts and recipes may be all that his teachers know. They tend to be impatient or even angry with the student who wants to know, not just what happened, but why it happened as it did and not some other way. They rarely have the knowledge to answer such questions, and even more rarely have the time; there is all that material to cover.
In short, our "Tell-'em-and-test-'em" way of teaching leaves most students increasingly confused, aware that their academic success rests on shaky foundations, and convinced that school is mainly a place where you follow meaningless procedures to get meaningless answers to meaningless questions.
— John Holt, How Children Fail